Chesapeake

  “What are you doing to me?” Steed asked the werowance.

  The young man remained silent. Pentaquod nudged him, but still he was afraid to speak. It was the old man who responded: “What have you done to us? Burned our pines. Cut down our tallest oaks. Driven deer from their homes and beaver from their lodges. Singed the feathers of birds and torn down the places where our children played. Steed, you have destroyed the paradise we shared with you.”

  Steed fell back before this torrent of accusation, then said persuasively, “Pentaquod, dear and trusted friend, you do not understand. If we burn the fields, we grow more tobacco. If we grow more tobacco, Captain Hackett’s ship will come more often. And when it does, you and your people can have guns for hunting.”

  “Before you came we earned our meat without guns.”

  “But you can have mirrors, too, and compasses like the one Captain Smith gave you. Remember?”

  “I have always known where north was,” the old man said.

  Then, in tones of bitter sadness, he informed Steed that henceforth no Choptanks would work for him, and no pleas from the Englishman reversed this harsh decision. In the midst of the great sweep to clear the fields, Steed’s entire labor force was retracted; not even one woman was permitted to help Martha and her three children. When Janney learned of the decision he proposed that they sail to Jamestown, conscript an army and burn the village unless the Indians returned to work, but Steed ridiculed such folly.

  Instead he and Janney stayed overnight at Patamoke, and in the morning sought a formal consultation with the werowance and Pentaquod. It was granted, and once more the white-haired old man appeared leaning upon his beautiful daughter. The realization that old ties were about to be shattered saddened the former leader, and he spoke gently to his friend. “What is it, Steed?”

  “Pentaquod, ally of many years, why do you harm us?”

  “There is no way that you and we can share this river.”

  “But we can! Your children and mine play together, speak the same tongue, love the same animals.”

  “No, Steed. In all things we grow apart. The time for separation is upon us.”

  “No need. When Captain Hackett’s ship comes you can have all the things we have.”

  “We do not want your things. They bring us only trouble.”

  When this was translated for Janney he wanted Steed to tell the old fool that if the Indians refused to work, they’d find out what real trouble was—even war. Such words Steed refused to translate, but Tciblento had learned enough English to advise her father as to what the other Englishman had said.

  “War?” Pentaquod repeated. “You speak of war? Do you know what happened across the bay when war came? Countless dead and hatred forever. Have you subdued the Potomacs or driven the Piscataways from your rivers, Janney? Steed and I have striven to see that such war does not scar our friendship, nor will it while I live.”

  Steed ignored this line of argument and did not translate for Janney, who sat glaring at the old man. What Steed focused on was labor. “Pentaquod, if you send your men to work for us, we’ll pay them ... well.”

  “And what will they buy with the roanoke?”

  “What they wish.” And he spread his hands to indicate the largesse of Europe.

  Pentaquod brushed aside this irrelevant logic and reminded Steed: “When you and your wife needed our help to build a home on your island, we worked for you. And when you wanted to clear fields to grow food, we helped again. I even told my people to instruct you in all skills you needed. Did not my own daughter Tciblento offer to instruct your wives?”

  Steed looked at the Indian girl, dressed in deerskin ornamented with fringes of mink and a necklace of beaver teeth, and for the first time realized what an amazingly beautiful woman she had become. His vision was cleared, perhaps, by the realization that after this fateful day there would be no more meetings. He became aware that he was blushing and that his eyes held on to hers for a shameful period, but he was incapable of looking away. Then he shook his head as if to awaken, and conceded, “Tciblento was most helpful.”

  Sadly the old man announced, “Steed, on this day we leave our village. You will see us no more.”

  “No!” Steed pleaded.

  “During many moons I have told my people that you and we could share the river, but I was wrong. You will always want to burn more, destroy more. We shall leave you to your fires.”

  Janney asked, “What’s he threatening now?”

  “They’re leaving,” Steed said.

  “Good!” Janney said with sudden approval. “Help them along. Kick them out.”

  “What do you mean?” Steed asked, but before the tough little countryman could explain, Pentaquod took Steed aside to ask a question which had perplexed him for years. “Dear friend,” he said, “many summers ago when the Great Canoe came into the bay, our people watched it carefully. They saw the white sails, but they also saw that the men had skins that glistened. What was this, Steed?”

  The Englishman pondered the question but could find no reasonable explanation, so Pentaquod repeated the problem, indicating himself on the deck of the ancient ship, with sun glinting from his body. “Oh!” Steed exclaimed. “It must have been a Spanish ship. Armor!” And he explained how a man encased in armor would glisten in sunlight, and then Pentaquod broached the matter that truly disturbed him. “In later days, when I am gone, the Choptanks will return to this village. Will you watch over Tciblento?”

  Steed did not reply. Tears so filled the old man’s eyes that no further words were necessary. They embraced, returned to the long hut, and separated for the last time. Tciblento stood on the riverbank as they started their sail homeward, a radiant woman, not waving goodbye, not tearful, just standing there in fading light aware that never again in this life would she see the fair Englishman.

  When the bateau reached the marsh Janney said excitedly, “We’re lucky to be rid of the lazy swine.”

  “But what are we going to do for help?”

  “Ships bring many an indentured lad to Jamestown.”

  “Can we afford them?”

  “Secret is, buy them cheap, work them to the bone. And when their seven years are up, kiss them goodbye.” He sucked on a tooth, then added, “But better times are coming. They’ve begun to bring whole shiploads of slaves from Africa. Captain Hackett offers them for sale.”

  “Same question. Can we afford them?”

  “Look, Steed. You can’t afford not to have them. You buy a slave once, he’s yours for life. He and his children. Best bargain ever offered.”

  But it was not as simple as Janney had proposed. Slaves did not arrive by shipload, and those that did straggle in as part of a cargo were kept in Virginia; they were too valuable to be wasted on uncertain fields across the bay. So as the Indians departed, their place was taken by white men from the dregs of London, but the bulk of the work was done by Steed and his wife. Theirs was the only plantation on the Eastern Shore, a daring, lonely outpost where the proprietors worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day, the unremitting toil always required if a home or a nation was to be built.

  Steed personally supervised each step in raising tobacco, from hoarding the precious seed—ten thousand did not fill a teaspoon—to topping the young plants, an operation which prevented useless leaves from proliferating high on the stalk and ensured a few big rich leaves at workable height; it had to be performed during the hottest days of July and August, when heat shimmered on still waters. Then Steed moved among his plants, nipping off tops by catching them between his right thumbnail and forefinger; in time his right hand grew larger and stronger than his left, his right thumbnail huge and dark and thick.

  One morning at breakfast Martha Keene—she would not adopt the name Steed before she was properly married—noticed the discoloration on Edmund’s thumb and surprised him by leaning across the table and kissing it—“The badge of our real nobility.”

  At that time in distant England, Edmund’s
older brother held the baronetcy and was known as Sir Philip Steed, but in the New World a new nobility was being born, of which the Steeds of Devon would be one of the founding families.

  When Martha Keene had volunteered to emigrate to Virginia, she performed an act of courage oft repeated, rarely appreciated; but when she moved on to the isolation of Dover Island, it was sheer heroism.

  How did she survive? Precariously. There was no doctor and only the slightest medication: calomel for indigestion, sassafras tea for fever. Constipation was a constant fear, for it could lead to more serious ills, so every family had its favorite purge; the ague was also a torment. Teeth were a special problem, and each locality owned one pair of forceps, worn and rusty, for the yanking away of rotting molars, plus some strong-armed man with good eyesight who did the job; two men held the patient by the shoulders, another lay across his knees, and the forceps would go to work, twisting and pulling until something shattered.

  Mothers watched with anguish as their children contracted an endless chain of diseases, sitting awake through fevered nights and grieving as the little ones were buried beneath loblolly pines. However, if the children survived this deadly assault, they developed an immunity that was striking; often they would live from eighteen through forty-eight with scarce an illness, rocklike people who could resist cold and hunger and poor nutrition, but by then they were elders and at fifty they were usually dead. Women especially died young, and it was not unusual for one husband to bury two wives before he left a young widow to survive him for twenty years.

  The house to which Martha came had been much improved by its former occupant, the lively Meg Shipton, but it was still little more than a primitive hut. It was superbly sited: as you left the Chesapeake your shallop moved due east through the channel north of the island, then turned south to enter the broad estuary leading to Devon Creek. A mile up that deep body of water brought you to a wharf projecting out from the northern shore, and above the wharf, on a small plateau of fine level land overlooking vast distances, stood the house. It had been built in stages, first a shack, then a separate kitchen located to the east so that the sun reached it at dawn, then a second floor with bedrooms fearfully cold in winter, and finally some connected sheds and storage areas.

  Meager furniture slapped together from local wood, sparse utensils carved from oak, a few knives and forks with spoons of wood, those were the things Martha had to work with. She had one iron kettle, suspended by a hook over an open fire, and a kind of iron-and-clay oven in which she performed miracles. A low fire was kept burning day and night, fueled by immense piles of wood outside the door. The place had few blankets but many animal skins, which in some ways were better, for they showed little soiling, and no sheets. Clothing was precious, a man’s trousers lasting for twelve or fifteen years of constant use, a woman’s dress surviving innumerable alterations and additions. Adornments were few, and those which a husband did bring were rarely worn though deeply cherished.

  The house had two peculiarities, one which infuriated Martha, one which provided foolish contentment. Since there was little glass in Jamestown and none in Devon, the Steeds had covered their windows with oiled paper, itself a precious commodity, and a score of times Martha, contemplating windows which allowed light but not vision, would catch herself complaining, “I do wish we had glass that someone could see through,” and each time a ship left their wharf for Bristol she begged, “Can’t they bring back some Holland glass?” What pleased her were the heavy pewter dishes; they had a solid quality, and to see them piled neatly in their pine cupboard was an experience she treasured. “I value them more than silver,” she told her husband, and as she washed them, she exulted: They are mine.

  Labor was specialized, for with the arrival of slaves at Jamestown it became practical for plantation managers there to cultivate particular skills among them. Slave women who could sew were taken indoors; men who could make shoes were valued; and especially treasured were those blacks who could convert oak trees into staves, and staves into hogsheads for shipping tobacco. Poor Steed, without access to slaves, had to master all the mechanical arts himself, then teach them to new servants as they reached Devon. It was a thankless task; he would spend two years instructing some clumsy lad how to shape a barrel, then enjoy only four years of profitable work from the young man, because the seventh year was largely wasted: the servant spent most of that time trying to locate land of his own on which to start a farm. Steed became the master teacher of the Eastern Shore, and Devon the university through which the Choptank would be civilized.

  A peculiar feature of life on Devon was that money did not exist. Sometimes the Steeds would go three years without seeing a coin, and when they did, it was apt to be of either Spanish or French origin. English pounds and shillings were incredibly scarce, a planned design on the part of the government in London and the king’s officers in the colonies. “As long as we control the flow of coins,” they reasoned, “we shall be in command.” So the plantations were strangled for lack of exchange; no Steed boy ever had a penny to spend, for there were no pennies, no place to spend them and nothing to spend them on.

  In self-defense the colonists invented their own specie: roanoke was universally accepted; tobacco could be legally used to pay any debt; and taxes were specifically levied in hogsheads of the weed. The total wealth of the Steeds, which was becoming impressive, was represented in tobacco, either in the fields, or in the drying sheds, or in hogsheads awaiting shipment, or in transit across the Atlantic, or in some warehouse in London. Slips of paper, often tattered, represented their savings.

  They looked to London for everything good. How precious a packet of needles was, how Martha grieved if she lost even one. Nails were like gold; one servant did nothing all year long but carve wooden nails, becoming so skillful that his fine products were exchanged widely throughout Virginia. Books came from London, and cloth, and utensils, and furniture, and every other thing that made a remote island tolerable. The Steeds still loved England, and when cross-ocean ships came into the creek the entire family crowded the wharf to find what good things had arrived from home, and often the letters brought tears, not from loss but from terrible homesickness.

  The wharf was interesting. To it and from it moved the lifeblood of the plantation, and its survival became a paramount concern. Tall cedar trees were sought, heavy at the base, tapering as they rose. These were cut, trimmed and hauled to the water’s edge. There heavy crossbars six feet long were nailed and lashed to a pole, whose thin end was then driven as far into the mud as the strength of two men determined. Then two additional men swung from the ends of the crossbar and worried the cedar pole into the river bottom. Finally, when it was well settled, two other men climbed a stand and with heavy blows of sledge hammers drove the piling home. It was to twenty-six such pilings that the wharf was attached, and it became so solid , that even large ships could tie up to it with security.

  Learning was a constant concern. Martha taught the three boys arithmetic and Latin, knowing that no young man could be considered educated unless proficient in that splendid tongue. Edmund felt it his responsibility to teach them history and Greek, but sometimes, after working so hard in the fields, he would fall asleep as the lessons progressed, and Ralph would nudge him and he would mumble, “Get on with your Greek. Do you want to be savages?” Each morning at five Edmund prepared himself for the day by reading books he had brought from Oxford—Thucydides and Josephus in Greek, Seneca and Cicero in Latin—and from these authors, along with Plutarch, whom he loved, he gained insight as to how men and nations should behave.

  Finally there was the chapel, that unpretentious building with the wooden crucifix. Here the Steeds met for prayer and the reaffirmation of their faith. They believed that God supervised their lives and marked it in their favor when they were kind to servants; but whenever the family left this place of prayer Martha lingered at the door, looked back at the altar and thought: One day I shall be married here.

&nbs
p; The problem of Steed’s religion no longer troubled the leaders of Virginia; he was known to be a difficult type, adhering to the faith for which his grandfather had been hanged, and certain books containing woodcuts of Sir Latimer being quartered for being a treasonous Papist circulated in the colony, but most Virginians seemed quite content to have him off to one side, across the bay and out of sight. Trouble arose in late 1633 when his son Ralph, now seventeen, felt that it was time to marry and start his own farm in the fields opposite Devon. Accordingly, he sailed down the Chesapeake, put into Jamestown, and asked permission to marry the daughter of a Virginia planter; relatives pointed out that the boy was Papist, son of an avowed Catholic father and a mother specially imported from England, but others argued, and with right, that young Ralph was hardly the son of the Catholic wife but of Meg Shipton, who was as fine a Protestant as the colony provided, she being the wife of the leading factor in the region. That left Ralph only half Catholic, but that was enough to prevent a marriage. The boy was desolated by this rebuff and retired to Devon in such low spirits that his father and mother halted what they had been doing to counsel with him. “Our family adheres to the one true faith,” Edmund said. “My grandfather died for it. My father suffered grave disqualifications. And I fled preferment in England so that I could raise my own chapel in Virginia. This is a heritage so precious that the loss of any girl, no matter how—”

  “Penny’s not any girl,” the boy countered.

  “She’s lovely,” Martha conceded, “and now she’s engaged to another, and what can be done about it but forget her and go back to work?”

  “I’ll never forget her,” Ralph said.

  “Nor should you,” Edmund said quickly, adding when his wife scowled, “I mean in the sense of remembering her as a fine young lady. But she’s gone, Ralph, and you’ve discovered what it means to be Catholic.”